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Saturday, August 1, 2015

Five Fandom Friday on Saturday: 5 Fictional Pets I'd Love to Own

So as it turns out, I missed more 5 Fandom Fridays in the "staycation" I had scheduled after my actual vacation. I turned out to be pretty busy, I guess—even without having any classes for all of July!

But it wasn't due entirely to schedule madness. I've been to exactly two conventions in my life (Anime Boston and VeriCon), and to be honest they're not really my thing. Besides, I was a broke college student when I went and so I bought exactly zero things. As for vehicles? Meh.

Animals are cute, though! And this question is actually rather apropos, as JV and I have been up to our eyeballs in Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated. Can you guess what my first choice in this 5 Fandom Friday would be? Can you?

1. Scooby-Doo

I need to find more friends who would do a Scooby-Doo group Halloween costume with me. (Dibs on Velma!)

JV and I both have a huge soft spot in our hearts for Scooby-Doo, despite some of the missteps the franchise has taken. (The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, anyone? Flim-Flam and his weirdo snake oil cure-all? Scrappy? Ugh.) He found out about the Mystery Incorporated reboot and we gave it a shot. Holy crap, I haven't laughed that much at a children's cartoon in years. The writers definitely wrote for the parents ("Fred, you're living in a van down by the river!"), even going so far as to get some grade-A voice talents both as recurring characters and as cameos. Lewis Black? Jim Rash? The actual Harlan Ellison as himself??? I hate to admit it but I was addicted to this series. We binge watched both seasons over the course of a week.

2. Mogget (Abhorsen)

Snarky magical being in the form of a white cat. Need I say more?

3. Akka (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils)

This is one is a little obscure for my anglophone readers, but I couldn't write this list and not include Akka. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils is a Swedish children's classic that I absolutely adore. The author, Selma Lagerlöf, is as beloved a figure here as Astrid Lindgren, though the Swedish folklore that permeates her writing probably means that it's not as universally appealing as Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking or Ronja the Robber's Daughter.Nils is about a bratty little piece of crap named Nils Holgersson who talks back to an elf and promptly gets shrunk down to elf size for punishment. While thus enminiatured, he hops on the back of the leader of his family's flock of geese and they travel all up and down Sweden. Along the way, Nils learns not to be a little shit and gets turned back to his human self.

Akka is the flock leader and she is one of the baddest, toughest bitches there ever was. Of course, Nils can only talk to her because his elf enchantment means he understand animal speech, so if Akka were my pet all she could do would be to honk at me. But if we're imagining fictional animals as real pets, I can bend the rules all I like. :P

I've read the Wonderful Adventures of Nils, but in Dutch translation, as a child, and I absolutely loved it. Selma Lagerlöf's books are actually well known in the Netherlands, and I think in the rest of Europe as well. Maybe it's an across-the-pond thing (Americans might not know about it). Then again, maybe she is less famous today than she was because of her books getting older and older.

A totally different thing, but I got Gösta Berlings saga for my birthday, in Swedish. Hopefully my Swedish will get better soon so I can start reading it. :)

I wonder if another reason isn't also that Northern/Central European folklore often overlaps with Nordic/Scandinavian and is thus a bit more familiar? I seem to remember a Hungarian friend of mine talking about how the movie version of Nils is a favorite in Hungary. Maybe. Maybe I'm making that up or misremembering. Erm...

I want to get Nils and Gösta Berlings Saga saga in Swedish! I can do okay with Hjalmar Söderberg in Swedish, so hopefully Lagerlöf isn't too much harder. But I might wait until I'm done with my schooling here before I try to fry my brain with classic literature in a non-native language, hah.